Böcker av Dag Henriksen

This book provides a comprehensive account of the use of airpower in the first year of the Ukraine conflict.Owing to the need to avoid direct war with Russia, NATO did not create a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine and the initial contest for air superiority ended in an uneasy state of mutual denial. Nevertheless, Russia's bombardment using long-range missiles meant that the need to provide Ukraine with effective ground-based air defense systems and fighter jets became a topic of public debate. The rationale of this book, therefore, is to provide an analysis of why all these facets of the air war over Ukraine during the first year of the conflict played out as they did. While NATO airpower doctrine prescribes the destruction of an enemy state's Integrated Air Defense System (IADS) and air force in the opening phase of a conflict to gain air superiority, and then employ decisive firepower and surveillance over the ground war, neither side has been able to achieve this. Western doctrine holds that control of the air is a vital and decisive factor in any modern war, but the war in Ukraine has largely been decided by grinding land combat. An overarching theme of the book, therefore, is to explain the Russian failure to achieve air superiority, and how this fact shaped the subsequent employment of airpower and the broader course of the first year of the war in a way that no one had predicted before the invasion.This book will be of much interest to students of air power, military and strategic studies, Russian and eastern European politics, and International Relations.

In this revealing work, Dag Henriksen discloses the origins and content of NATO's strategic and conceptual thinking on how the use of force was to succeed politically in altering the behavior of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The air campaign, known as Operation Allied Force, was the first war against any sovereign nation in the history of NATO and the first major combat operation conducted for humanitarian purposes against a state committing atrocities within its own borders. This book examines the key political, diplomatic, and military processes that shaped NATO and U.S. management of the Kosovo crisis and shows how air power became the main instrument in their strategy to coerce the FRY to accede to NATO's demands.The book further shows that the military leaders set to execute the campaign had no clear strategic guidance on what the operation was to achieve and that the level of uncertainty was so high that the officers selecting the bombing targets watched NATO's military spokesman on CNN for guidance in choosing their targets. Henriksen argues that structures preceding the Kosovo crisis shaped the management to a much greater degree than events taking place in Kosovo and that the air power community's largely institutionalized focus on high-intensity conflicts, like the 1991 Gulf War, hampered them from developing strategies to fit the political complexities of crises. Because fighting and wars in the lower end of the intensity spectrum are likely to surface again, study of the Kosovo crisis offers lessons for future international conflicts in which the combination of force and diplomacy will play a very significant role.